Before she left, Madhuri gave me a cell phone that you "recharge" periodically with more rupees. I went to the Airtel shop to recharge it. I ran into this thing I have now seen in a variety of ways--a weird hybrid of technology and 1900's bookkeeping. To add rupees to my cell phone, they call it and enter a code. They can't do a big amount all at once, so they did it in 4 INR250 increments. They don't use computers and you can't do this from home. They pull out a ledger and handwrite the information about how much they recharged your phone with, and what codes were used. The ledger and the phone they called my phone with to recharge it are shown below.
For some reason, no one here seems to think this clash of technology and not technology seems all that strange, but it seemed pretty amusing to me! I can beam cash to your phone, but I don't have a computer to record the transaction on.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
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